395 Quotes by Lorrie Moore

It was not miserable – often I did not miss her at all. But there was sometimes a quick, sinking ache when I walked in the door and saw she was not there. Twice, however, I’d felt the same sinking feeling when she was.

I’ve never been to a dinner party where everyone at the dinner table didn’t say something funny.

That was also back in the days when I thought the ice-cream man lived in his truck.

I don’t care if I’m a fish, I still want a bicycle.

She had expected a pistol to seem light and natural-a seamless extension of her angry feral self.

Twenty-year-olds have a kind of emotional idealism about relationships and about the world that enables them to say, ‘No, you lied to me. Goodbye.’ When they see wickedness, they walk away.

This is why a woman makes things up: Because when she dies, those lives she never got to are all going down with her. All those possibilities will just site there like a bunch of school kids with their hands raised and uncalled on – each knowing, really knowing, the answer.

What I really felt was this: chopped down like a tree, a new feeling, and I was realizing that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good. And feelings might take on actual physical form, like those sad fish lips, a mouth speared into a gasping silence, or worse.

What was education for, if not to acquire contradictions? At least it looked like that to me.